MASS EFFECT: INTERREGNUM
DIVINE INTERVENTION
PROLOGUE
It was dark.
He sat alone, surrounding by stacks of electronics, quietly humming away as the search ran.
Days passed. He didn't move.
Finally, after hundreds of hours, trillions of calculations, the computer's main voice hub spoke, for the first time in weeks.
"Alert: potential profile match."
The batarian swivelled his chair around to the console so quickly he almost fell out of it. Short, sharp bursts of sickly green light flickered across his face as he pored over the data, suddenly as awake as ever, eyes gleaming.
"Analyse."
"Computing."
"Project."
"Done."
What looked to be a blank grey wall exploded into life. Green filaments traced their way across it, winding around each other like serpents as they constructed an image, twelve feet long and six high. At first it was nothing more than a basic wireframe, something a kid with some piece-of-crap pirated program could have knocked up inside an hour, but it was constantly evolving, the glowing threads weaving around each other in three dimensions until the whole image detached itself from the screen and floated outwards into the centre of the room, a fiendishly complex neon construct.
"Location."
"Orbital reconstruction rings. Specific berth remains unknown."
"Run a trace."
"Running."
He'd known it would pay off. It had cost him dear, taking damn near every credit from a hundred accounts from across the galaxy, but it had paid off a hundredfold. The orbital stations above Deinech were famed for their secrecy, the product of an effort to follow Invictus and Omega into that exclusive club of five-star criminal hives; the chop-shops of the Terminus systems, they promised that they offered total anonymity to their clients as their ships were refitted and overhauled. They said that if you took a ship to Deinech, you could fly a completely different vessel out of the system without leaving your cabin and without a soul knowing.
Until today, they hadn't been lying.
The batarian unfolded himself from his chair and stood up, feeling his joints click and creak back into place. He hadn't left the chair in days, retreating into the state of near-hibernation his race had evolved, a counter to Khar'shan's vicious winters. Dark eyes glistened wetly under the emerald light as his heart, slowed to a faint limp for so long, crashed back into normal operation by running at three times its normal rate. His body burned as blood rushed around it, but pain wasn't important right now. He could ignore pain. He couldn't ignore this.
"Location is potentially any of berth eighty-nine to one hundred and six. Attempting further refinement."
He walked over to the frame of light hanging in the air as it continued to weave itself into definition. It was recognisably a ship now, though you'd be hard pressed to tell what sort.
"Final refinement: berth is between ninety-nine and one hundred and four."
"Five potential sources?"
"Correct. It is only due to your modifications that we are able to differentiate the signal to this extent."
"Spare the compliments. Give me a clear picture."
"Computing."
The hull of the ship was becoming clearer now. He recognised it as a basic model offered by the orbitals, a cheap imitation of a cheap imitation. The design was civilian, a mid-range off-the-shelf piece carefully shaped to look as non-threatening and unimportant as possible. It was about the right size...
"Exterior appearance complete."
The ship jumped into sharp focus as the green lines went into overdrive, spinning themselves around the frame in a crude approximation of texture.
"The design is a basic model, offered at a price of one hundred thou-"
"Shut up. Demonstrate interior profile."
"Only a basic profile can be established-"
"Show it."
The green lines began to fade until their glow was gone entirely, leaving nothing but their wiry shapes hanging in the air. Different lines began to fade in, inside the green, visible through the translucent plating. These ones were done in a harsh white, at first tracing nothing more than a vague shape underneath the exterior hull. Nothing well-defined enough to get a good look, not yet.
"ETC."
"Estimated time to completion: one minute twelve seconds."
"Run Mu-core process nine-five-K. No arguments. Do it."
The lines froze for a second mid-writhe, then started up again at double pace. Every other item of electronics in the room cut out, even his own omnitool.
"Show points of comparison with reference L-W-six-six-three."
A dozen red sparks leapt into existence, dotted along the white lines. A new one appeared as the form took shape, and then another and another until several more were appearing every second.
The white lines still hadn't forged a coherent shape, but there was a reason for that. As they twisted around each other and hummed through the air like miniature energy bolts, they were shaping something which didn't seem to have any real shape; no streamlining, utterly unaerodynamic, with struts and metallic extrusions jutting out seemingly at random.
As he watched, the red spots were multiplying exponentially. Inside a couple more seconds, there was more red than white.
"Match likelihood: ninety nine point eight seven percent."
"Remove external hull and similarity comparison."
The green and red died away, leaving only the sharp glow of the white. The ship was shapeless and ugly, but that didn't matter to him. All that mattered was the ship itself.
He raised an arm, let one hand glide along the intangible hull. Deus, you're no god if you can't even hide my ship from me. As to whether you can keep it...
We'll see.
"Revised match likelihood: ninety nine point nine nine one percent."
"Computer," he said, still staring at the white hologram in front of him, "call Melenis and Erash. Inform that I have work for them." He paused for a second, and frowned, before adding: "Oh, and they might think I'm dead. Make sure to tell them that I'm not."
"Running."
"In addition, tell them... tell them... hmm."
The batarian's lips pulled back to reveal a row of yellowing teeth, glinting in the light.
"Tell them I've hit the jackpot."